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Last month I took an impromptu trip to see family out of state. It was fantastic: a lovely time with my brother’s family, and exactly what I needed after a tough time at work. I showed up at the airport, sad to go, but happy to have had the chance to catch up with some of the people who mean most to me.

When I got on the plane, things took a sharp turn. The flight was oversold, and I was assigned at the last minute to a middle seat. As soon as I sat down, one of the people sitting next to me seemed to get agitated. He got up four, maybe five times to talk to flight attendants. He checked over his shoulder at least a dozen times. Finally, a flight attendant crouched down next to him and whispered something I couldn’t hear. The passenger got up and moved to a seat one row up. Before he sat down, he turned to me and said, “this is so you’ll have more room.”

The flight attendant looked at him, puzzled, then looked at me and said, “this won’t be a vacant seat. Someone will still be sitting here.” The passenger looked away, then sat down.

Throughout the flight, attendants offered free beer, wine and extra snacks to the people sitting on either side of me. They didn’t say much to me. I folded my arms, locked my legs together, and tried not to make eye contact with anyone. This was the moment I’d come to dread as a fat traveler. I had been singled out—and so publicly—as a nuisance, a burden, a blight. All of this, for having the body I’ve always had, nothing more.

No matter how good I was, no matter how small I tried to make my body, I couldn’t even take a fucking two hour flight. I spent the rest of my time on the plane replaying the interaction in my mind to see if I was wrong, if I’d misread cues, or if there was something I could have said or done differently. The landing couldn’t come soon enough.

As travelers filtered into the aisle to get their bags, the passenger who moved looked at me. He said, “you know, I wouldn’t do this to a person with a walker.”

“What?”

“I wouldn’t do this to a person with a walker, or a pregnant woman.”

“I know,” I said. “That’s what makes this terrible.”

And there it was: a perfect stranger, telling me in no uncertain terms that he didn’t even want to be near me. All because I’m fat. All the doubt drained out of me and I felt the sting of humiliation—the same feeling I felt in grade school, when my parents sent me to fat camp. The same feeling from middle school, when a fellow swim team member told me no one would want to see me compete. The same feeling I felt at the doctor’s office last year, when another patient told me that “a woman your size shouldn’t wear belts.” It’s the same feeling every time. After this flight, it took days to feel like I’d even partly let go of it. I still haven’t shaken it all the way. Because of that cumulative effect, I’m not sure that I ever will.

So often, when I think of my experience as a fat person, these are the moments I think of: the rejection, humiliation, shame, frustration and struggle. But my while my life is shaped by these moments, it’s not defined by them. In that moment, on that plane, despite having a whole job centered around combating discrimination, and despite having spent years thinking and talking and writing about dismantling oppression, I completely lost my sense of self. And that is, in part, because I didn’t have an affirming script to fall back on. Or, at least, not one that I’d internalized as deeply as I internalized the hurt, frustration and anger.

I’ve been waiting to hear someone tell me what, as a fat person, I ought to be able to rely on, and what’s reaching too far, taking too much. When am I reasonable? When am I greedy, angry, insatiable? I kept expecting to see some kind of fatty bill of rights that someone else would make, so it would feel official—more real than anything I could create. But in a world where those affirmations don’t exist, we must create them for ourselves and one another.

So I’m starting that list here. This is what I’ve needed to hear, but it’s not everything. I hope you’ll add more in the comments.

A MANIFATSO.

We have the right to our bodies. We have the right to weigh 90 pounds (or less), 400 pounds (or more), and every number in between. We have a right to the bodies we have, the bodies we need, the bodies we were born with, and the bodies that reflect our gender identities. We have the right to spaces that respect and accommodate our bodies, not bodies that shrink and change fit the spaces that exist. We have the right to health care that provides the services that our minds and bodies need – not what others’ bias, prejudice and ignorance tells us we need. We have the right to transition-related health care and non-medical transitions; to birth control, reproductive health, and whatever health care our bodies, minds and identities need to be our whole selves.

We have the right to eat. We have the right to eat salad and potato chips and lentils and pork ribs. We have the right to eat anything and everything: foods that reflect our families, histories and culture; foods that affirm our values and identities; foods that give us the nutrition we need, and foods that don’t. We have the right to access safe, healthy, affordable food, regardless of income level. And we have the right to eat all of it in whatever amounts we choose and are able.

We have the right to travel, regardless of whether we are the size, shape or ability designers and engineers expected. We have the right to pass through airport security without every detailed inch of our bodies being projected to security agents. We have the right to sit in any airplane, stand on any bus, ride any bike or drive any car to get us where we need to go.

We have the right to work without fear of discrimination. We have the right to new jobs, to promotions, to bad days and big accomplishments. We have the right to bring all of our talents, skills and passions to bear, and we have the right to whatever work supports ourselves, our families, and our communities. And we, like all workers, have the right to respect, and to policies that keep us safe and our jobs secure.

We have the right to family, love, sex, all of the above, or none of it. We have the right to sleep with and partner with the people we want, for as long as we want to, in whatever formation reflects and affirms us. We have the right to date people we’re attracted to and who are attracted to us, without being criticized for having partners who are too fat, too thin, too plain or “out of our league.” We have the right to be seen publicly with our partners, whatever their size, shape, gender or ability.

We have the right to raise children—fat children, thin children, and everything in between—without our fitness as parents coming under attack. We also have the right not to raise children without being portrayed as lonely, tragic or defective.

We have the right to walk down the street without being met with glares, stares, verbal harassment or physical assault. And we retain those same rights in restaurants, gyms, job interviews, and our day-to-day lives. We have the right to the anxiety and hurt that results from this treatment, and we have the right to let it go.

We have the right to be wallflowers or social butterflies, awesome or awkward, without our personalities being attributed to our body size, shape, or ability. We have the right to be our own people or tell our own stories. We have the right to be romantic leads, action heroes, or just real people with real challenges and successes, without being relegated to the role of the fat best friend. We also have the right to be fat best friends.

We have the right to health care that doesn’t reduce all of our health problems to our weight, or balk at healthy fat people. We have the right to respectful, precise, accessible health care, with treatments and services that reflect our needs, our beliefs and our histories.

We have the right to be good people, bad people, people with our own sets of morals and ethics that are not defined by our weight, our diet, our exercise regiment, or our blood pressure. These are indicators of what’s happening in our bodies, not telltale signs about our morality, our fitness to serve as role models, or our impact on our children, neighbors or communities. We have the right to go to the doctor’s office, even just once, even just for a fever or a broken arm, without being lectured about losing weight. We have the right to health care that helps us, not health care that shames us.

We have the right to safe and inclusive community free from racism, anti-immigrant xenophobia, and oppression on the basis of our race, ethnicity, nationality or immigration status. We have the right to live safe, free lives without being scapegoated for social, economic, political or public health problems that are too often wrongly attributed to us.

We have the right not to be policed for the food we eat, for exercise, body size, or body shape. We have the right to live free from body policing, wherever it comes from, be that the media, the world at large, our friends, our families, or even one another.

We have the right to resist fatphobia as a tool of colonialism, that seeks to dismantle our very bodies and senses of self by imposing white, Western beauty standards worldwide. These are constructs of power, not constructs of our communities. And like any tools of imperialism or colonialism, we will resist it. We have the right to understand and describe our bodies in a way that reflects our cultures and histories, and resists them as we see fit. We have the right to know that fat is beautiful, powerful, worthy and good. We have the right to friends, family and communities who know that, too.

We have the right to state our needs, then get those needs met respectfully, without reductive dialogue or petty pushback on those needs. We have the right to our lives, our families, our identities, our histories and our communities. We have the right to be who we are–all of who we are.

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A colleague and I recently gave a training on how to be a good ally to trans communities. For those who’ve been through similar trainings, it’s nothing earth-shattering: respect people’s gender pronouns, don’t ask people when they’re having “the surgery,” and generally avoid forcing loads of intrusive questions or making a slew of judgments based on someone’s identity (or what you believe their identity to be). Basic, right?

But something surprising happened at this training. Many of the cisgender (non-trans) people in the room were struggling for analogies, for parallel identities and oppressions to help them understand a community that’s new to them. But what surprised me was the number of people who compared being trans to being fat. According to many, their perception of whether or not a trans person is “successfully passing” (that is: presenting as a gender-conforming person) is just like their perception of someone’s thinness. If someone is passing well, or if they’ve lost weight, praise them. If you clock them as trans, or if they’ve gained weight, it would be rude to mention. These comparisons were made left, right and center.

And as these comparisons were made, I felt myself begin to shake, from frustration, from sadness, from powerlessness, from anger. Good as their intentions were, as a fat person, I felt more and more shameful, more and more erased, less and less valid. I can only imagine how trans-identified people in the room felt.

We hear these comparisons all the time. Being trans is like being gay. Being a gay couple is like being an interracial couple. Being fat is like being a person with a disability. And everything, apparently, is just like being a person of color.

To their credit, this is often the way that allies—and many community members—struggle to find the language of oppression that hasn’t been taught to them. They’re reaching to link our struggles, and that’s a good impulse. The problem is, they’re doing it in a way that is substantially flawed and makes it deeply difficult to build relationships, coalitions and movements across lines of identity.

why we compare identities.

Overwhelmingly, we do it because our intentions are good. Sometimes we do it to better understand allied communities—to deepen our understanding of the needs and experiences of other communities. Sometimes we do it to give voice to our own experience of oppression in a culture that doesn’t provide us with the tools or opportunities to speak for our experiences of marginalization. Again, the intention here is good: we’re trying to start conversations that establish various forms of oppression as real, valid and harmful.

The problem is that identity comparisons are often overarching and ineffective—and they don’t really help us meet those goals. While our intentions are good, these comparisons don’t create the impacts we hope for. So what I want to talk about today is the unintended impacts they create. So: what are the challenges with comparing identities, communities and movements?

(Note: I’ve focused here on race, LGBT, and fat, because those are the examples that I deal with most frequently, but there are many, many more. Feel free to add yours in the comments.)

problems with comparing identities.

It glosses over substantial differences in experience in a way that can be hurtful, insulting and alienating. After Prop 8 banned same-gender marriage in California, gay news magazine the Advocate published a cover story that declared that “gay is the new black.” The problem is, this is frequently stated by white queer people. And while white queer people have historically experienced hate crimes, police raids, and a whole lot more, we haven’t been lynched, been forced to sit at the back of the bus, or experienced the accumulation of oppression over generations on a single family or neighborhood. Black/African-American communities have. Intentional or not, claiming that “gay is the new black” is deeply disrespectful, and it’s often experienced as such.

It’s an escape hatch for ally education. When we compare our identities to others that we don’t share, we can unintentionally imply that we’ve got nothing to learn. And sometimes we can even believe it.

The logic goes like this: if I say that my identity is just like yours, then presto!, I have nothing new to learn about your experience or needs, because they’re the same as mine. And if I already know all there is to know, I don’t need to change anything about what I’m doing to make spaces, communities or movements more accessible to people with differing identities.

In that way, it also paves the way for pushing aside identity-specific needs. If being fat is like having a disability, then I just need to make this event accessible for me, and it will automatically be accessible for you, right? Wrong. Many fat people don’t seek need ramps, bars, or ASL interpretation. And making the comparison keeps us from grappling with the complexity of the identities of those around us. It keeps us from growing, and it keeps others from participating.

problems with comparing movements.

It claims someone else’s work. I’m a young white queer woman. I wasn’t alive during the highest profile work of the Civil Rights movement, and I didn’t begin to take on anti-racist work until very recently, in the scheme of racial justice history in the US. But if I say fat acceptance is “the next great Civil Rights movement,” I’m claiming that work as my own and conflating oppressions in a way that (rightfully) alienates communities of color.

Sometimes, it implies that other forms of oppression are “over” or “fixed.” Frequently, we hear that fat is the last acceptable discrimination. The implication here is that other forms of oppression are somehow remedied or obsolete. Racism isn’t “fixed.” We haven’t “cured” our society of xenophobia. But that’s the implication.

And all of that alienates potential allies. These comparisons, well-intentioned though they may be, divide our communities against one another. LGBT communities know the pain of police raids, but we don’t readily and uniformly ally ourselves with immigrant communities, who face raids and deportation at staggering rates. Fat people know the sting of discrimination and exclusion (see: Southwest Airlines policies), but many of us still dismiss concerns over ableism. And when we draw sloppy parallels that make broad generalizations (while failing to pinpoint shared experience and values), we alienate the communities we are best positioned to support—and that are best positioned to support us.

drawing effective parallels.

This doesn’t mean that drawing parallels is out of the question—it just means that comparisons must be made carefully and thoughtfully. Here are some ways to draw thoughtful, nuanced parallels.

Point to shared opposition & tactics of oppression. A great example of this: Suzanne Pharr’s stellar essay, The Common Elements of Oppression.In it, Pharr discusses the ways the common tactics used to oppress—but she is careful not to conflate communities or types of oppression. Both immigrant communities and LGBT communities are accused of seeking “special rights.” That’s a tactic used to divide and marginalize us. That means our struggles are linked—it does not mean they are the same through and through.

Point to shared needs. Since our opposition (and their tactics) are shared, our communities often experience similar needs. So when budget cuts target low-income people and communities of color, our needs are shared. When bullying targets trans youth and fat youth, our needs are shared. And when oppression and privilege are so poorly understood as a whole, many of our communities can benefit from some serious public education.

Be specific. Sweeping generalizations (a la “gay is the new black”) are dicey at best, so specificity can be helpful. Are you trying to draw a parallel between communities’ shared experiences? Their shared oppressors? Similar institutionalized discrimination? Be sure to voice what you are specifically thinking.

what else you can do.

Support the work of allied movements. If you’re a white queer person, like me, fight against police profiling and brutality. If you haven’t experienced the criminal justice system as a prisoner, work for prisoner’s rights for those who have. Believe in them, yes, and do something. Write your elected official. Phone bank. Attend a rally. Taking action is the most meaningful way to contribute.

Speak about the oppression you face on its own terms. Grant it the integrity to speak for itself. I feel fatphobia deeply enough on a daily basis that I can describe it in extraordinary detail. I know, and trust, that those experiences speak for themselves, and do not need to rely on broad parallels to others’ oppression.

Use “I” statements. I know, it’s well-worn and hackneyed territory, but it works. Speak from your own experience, and avoid speaking on behalf of communities with which you don’t identify.

Interrogate your own privilege. At the core of these comparisons is a deep desire to help those around us more fully grasp our own understanding of oppression. And that desire is often paired with the internalized entitlement that comes with privilege—and that’s what creates the impulse to reach so readily for someone else’s experience in order to describe our own.

Continuing to challenge our own sense of privilege and the internalized ways in which we appropriate others’ experiences is one of the most lasting ways to stem the tide of the comparisons that divide us while seeking to unite us. And while that tide goes out, we can build more meaningful relationships across identities, and stronger coalitions across movements for true and lasting social justice.

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Last Saturday, all three You’re Welcome writers got drinks together and recorded a great, meaty conversation about jokes, power, identity, and leaning into stereotypes. It’s transcribed below.

Before this conversation, we talked briefly about the lines between self-deprecating jokes and powerful humor. We recognize that self-deprecation can be empowering for some, but we’ve often found it to be damaging (especially as one of the only socially sanctioned ways in which many marginalized folks relate to our identities). Today, the three of us feel like we approach humor about our identities, for the most part, in a way that’s self-affirming rather than self-deprecating. This conversation is about the particular kinds of humor we find to be consensual and illuminating.

In order to track this conversation, it’s probably helpful to know a little bit about our identities. tenderqueer identifies as white, trans, and genderqueer. Luchador identifies as a queer xicano. Lunette identifies as a fat, white, intersex, queer femme.

That said, enjoy our first roundtable conversation about the power of identity-based jokes and leaning into stereotypes. Leave a comment to join in the conversation!

Lunette: So here’s what I want to know. How do each of you lean into and joke about stereotypes? What are the stereotypes, jokes and preconceptions you lean into, what are the ones you push on, and why? I’ll say that I definitely lean into the food-crazed fatty stereotype. I enjoy food, I like enjoying food, and if someone pushes back, I can call them out. It’s a little bit of baiting people, you know? “Say something. Try me.”

Luchador: I do think there is a difference in how people treat fatness vs a racial or sexual identity., People are very open about their lack of acceptance. When you lean into fat jokes, they have to think about whether or not that’s funny. The reason I make a lot of race jokes is that it stops people, makes them think about what they were assuming, and makes them aware of what they feel entitled to say.

Lunette: There is a difference there. Everybody has thoughts about race, and everybody gets that it’s a sensitive topic. Everybody has thoughts about fat, but people think it’s a rude topic.

tenderqueer: A lot of cultures in the US & abroad value thinness and a certain physique. “We all know that this is the best way to be, but you shouldn’t say overtly fucked up things in front of someone.” It’s politeness. But people are more confused about race. White people are more confused about race.

Lunette: Yeah. I think white people understand that they need to be sensitive around race, but some white people feel so sensitive around it that they just don’t talk about it.

Luchador: People talk about fatness like it’s an illness. You don’t discuss someone’s illness in public. But with race and gender, people know that they shouldn’t be that way, they shouldn’t have those thoughts, but they still do, so they have a lot of guilt. And I’m talking about people who generally have an analysis—people who are progressive. But that same group of people think of fatness as an addiction or an illness. “We are aware of your feelings, so we won’t mention that around you.” But addressing fatness can really challenge that. When you make jokes about it, if you make those jokes well, they stop thinking of it as an illness and start thinking of it in an identity framework.

Lunette: I think, around race, that you, as a politicized person of color in a very white part of the country, you’re not something that a lot of white people encounter often. There is the possibility to primarily, or even exclusively, engage with white people here. So when white people meet someone with strong race politics, someone like you, they’re on edge.

Luchador: I don’t try very hard to make white people feel comfortable around me. Often, when white people ask me my name, they follow up and ask if they can call me something shorter, and when they shorten my name, they try to translate it into a whiter name. If I wanted to make them feel okay about that, I’d say “sure, my friends have this nickname for me.” But then there’s no acknowledgement that what that person said was fucked up or insulting. I also feel that if I don’t say something, this fool’s going to continue to talk to other people of color this way, and make them feel like their names are too long or funny or wrong.

In LA, I knew that white people, regardless of their politics around race, knew they would get their asses kicked if they said something fucked up. And I’m comfortable with that kind of acknowledgement, because the alternative is no acknowledgment..

Lunette: I do feel like the stuff you do around race is a little bit about creating trauma.

Luchador: Well, trauma worked really well for me around understanding race. I have a lot of race-related trauma. I know my place is in society because I have experienced racism and each lesson has been traumatic through painful experiences with discrimination. I found out what worked and what didn’t because of this trauma. White people go without this trauma and get upset when they can’t say certain words that POC can say. I find myself in the position of having to explain a lot and frankly I need to make sure it sticks.

tenderqueer: I think I make jokes about being genderqueer or being trans in a tactical way to establish what’s messed up. “Someone actually said this to me today! Isn’t that messed up?” And I do a little bit of the “I can say that, but you can’t” jokes. Or “one person can say that to me, but pretty much no one else can.”

Lunette: I see you do that with gender presentation stuff, too. Pink backpack, daisies on your bike helmet.

tenderqueer: It allows me to make “man jokes,” and people understand that they need to take them differently because I have a pink backpack and sparkly things. But if I didn’t have those things, I could make those jokes, and they would not be received in the way I intend them. My goal with jokes is to help people understand what I’m saying, and I want to play to the person who’s least likely to get it. I want the people in the nosebleed seats to understand that I’m making a joke at the expense of the assumptions they have about me.

Luchador: I also make jokes that my identity doesn’t allow me to make, to people I shouldn’t be making them with. Like you guys. If you ask me to do something, t, and I say I can’t, and you start to object, I can say, “it’s because I’m transphobic.” And I say it in front of people I shouldn’t say it around. And then you respond with, “well, I’m racist.” You correct me on your pronouns, I tell you to learn Spanish.

We have extremes in our environment, with people who really understand identity and people who really don’t. But there are a lot of people who just need some help to understand, and to make it normal. I think that the way you make something normal is to joke about it. But it also lets people expand and establish their boundaries. “We don’t have the same identity, but you can make fun of this stuff with me, and we’re going to get through this together. And if I say something offensive to you, we can joke about it.”

Lunette: And just talk about it, honestly and openly, which is really rare.

Luchador: Without it being a production. That humor is a quick, efficient way of letting you know that I just fucked up, and you letting me know that we’re working through it, without a heavy series of one-on-one accountability conversations. That’s not culture. Culture is humor, culture can be light and creative, and when we lean into identity this way, we change the culture we’re in.

Lunette: If we get into those accountability conversations all the time, and never joke about identity, it’s never normalized. It’s never okay. The humor that you bring to it in particular, Luchador, is that you’ll give someone a lot of shit, but you’ll be there to help them through it. “Yes, I’m giving you a hard time, but I’m also an open book. I’m also here to help you.”

Luchador: I don’t want to lie to people. Saying, “no, no, that’s okay!” when people say something offensive . I would be lying and it also wouldn’t address the issue. I take the risk that I may not connect with people by being polite but they won’t ever forget the conversation I had with them.

tenderqueer: It’s also approval, coming from you. I knew the first time that you made fun of me, I thought, “that means you like me.” And doing that gives me permission to do that. Before I met you, I didn’t totally know how to engage with people this way, with humor. And for me, part of it is healing. You have to level with living in a world with horrible racism, transphobia, sexism, sizeism, all this horrible shit, and every day, each of us is feeling that in some way. We’re very aware of the way the deck is stacked against us. But if we can make a joke about it, that helps.

Lunette: And it’s building relationships across lines of identity. It’s a really important way to learn how to deal with other people’s identities. I learn a lot through humor.

Luchador: Humor builds our own analysis and the analysis of anyone who’s witnessing that conversation. When I joke with you two, I try to say things that I think you want the rest of the group to know. I try to bring things up so you don’t have to be in it alone. If people are neglecting identity, avoiding talking about it, or talking about it in a way that’s oversimplified, we can say something about our identities that we might only say to other people within our community. If we say it as a joke, everyone in the room is suddenly aware of that aspect of identity in a deeper way.

Lunette: And you can play off of each other.

Luchador: Right. You make a fat joke about yourself, and it gets awkward, but then I make a joke that validates your identity, and suddenly it’s okay.

Lunette: It’s third party validation. It’s theater.

Luchador: Sometimes it’s conscious, but often it’s very reactive. It’s just a reflex. It’s a response to being really overwhelmed. In those moments, there’s so much education to do, and I can’t do all of it right now, but we can make a joke about it, everybody can see the social cues, and it’s so much faster than trying to facilitate a goddamn workshop around that one awkward moment.

Lunette: Plus, when we play off of each other like that, when we interact in this theatrical way, it takes the power away from the person who said the fucked up thing. No one’s paying attention to them anymore. Now they’re paying attention to us. It changes the balance of power.

Luchador: Right. Part of the goal is to educate people. But sometimes the goal is just to get them to stop saying fucked up things. And when we take control of the conversation, it’s suddenly on our terms.

Lunette: It’s one of very few opportunities you get in daily life to interact with identity on your own terms.

tenderqueer: There’s also a “cool kids” dynamic. If we’re making these jokes, as people with complex identities, we know what we’re talking about, and people do take note of that.

Lunette: There’s also a degree of perceived elitism in that “cool kids” dynamic. And for people who dislike engaging with identity, that dynamic can further alienate them. It can make them more entrenched.

Luchador: Our jobs are identity-based. Our jobs involve coming up with ways to talk about identity, to break it down, to affirm it. So when we joke with each other around identity, it really messes with people. It disorients them. They do take the cue from us, and it’s confusing, since we’re the ones creating the framework and we’re the ones making fun of the framework.

And there’s a particular way we joke about things. I would never joke with you about things that actually hurt you. I would never use the wrong pronouns just to mess with you. I would never say the things that people say when they’re trying to hurt you.

tenderqueer: There’s a level of respect there. All of us have messed up with each other’s identities at some point. We can have really good, honest conversations and still joke with each other. However we deal with things, there’s a maintained level of respect that comes from being able to laugh at and with each other.

Lunette: When I get called out through a joke, it doesn’t haunt me the way an accountability conversation does. If someone makes a joke that makes it clear that I stepped over a line, I just stop stepping over that line, and I move on.

tenderqueer: When someone tells me, “you crossed a line, and we need to have a conversation about that,” I have those moments burned into my brain. But when someone makes a joke about it, I get it, and it’s over.

Lunette: And not every moment warrants that.

Luchador: Jokes can take care of a lot of awkward little moments. You slipped, I’m going to clown you, and that reinforces that you should be thinking about it more, and it doesn’t turn you off to thinking about it.

Lunette: It also subverts some power dynamics. If someone has more power than you, you might not be able to call them out directly every time, but you can definitely make a joke without putting yourself at too much risk.

Luchador: If you point out that the emperor has no clothes, then suddenly, everyone has access to the same information in the same way at the same moment. It shifts the power. Now everyone’s on the same playing field. Joking gives people an opportunity to maintain your relationship with someone and still say an intense thing you need to say. It allows you to say both “you’re not wearing any clothes” and “I know you noticed” at the same time. And they can choose to laugh at the joke and save face.

tenderqueer: That piece about shifting the power really resonates with me. I think that’s really true. Sometimes the only way you can claim power is by making a joke.